by John YoungImagine you are a member of an isolated tribe composed of 20 members: five men, five women and ten children. Imagine further that this tribe is on the edge of existence with the efforts of every adult being needed to assure the continuation and wellbeing of the tribe. Imagine even further that a stranger walks in from another village; and kills one of the men. What is to be done about this?The first thing that is to be done is to protect all of the other members of the village from his predation through, at least, the incapacitation of the stranger. Say, through capturing him and tying him up. But what next?In this tribe, is there any justice whatsoever to taking the limited food from the remaining members of the tribe, compromising their already meager diets, in order to sustain someone who, if he were to escape, might endanger others? Would there be any justice at all in taking food from the surviving children of the man who was killed and using it to feed the prisoner?No. In this tribe, the only real answer to the criminal, the only real justice, is death.It is fundamentally WRONG to expect the victims of a criminal, particularly a criminal who has slain a family member, to impoverish themselves in order to sustain him. The fact that in this example I am speaking of a small tribe does not change the principle when scaled to the size of a society where instead of sustaining the criminal directly through food; he is sustained indirectly through taxes. It is a moral insult of the most egregious sort to expect a father’s paycheck to pay for the medical care of a man who raped and killed his daughter.So, in principle, in a just society, the death penalty would be available as an appropriate punishment for those who would work death upon its members. Within the context of a just society — or at least a society as just as practicable because perfection eludes us in the temporal realm — the death penalty should be available for appropriately heinous crimes. Even further, for the members of the tribe to be forced to subsidize ANY prisoner’s existence; that prisoner should be in a system that will appropriately reform him into a productive member of society when he is eventually released. The idea of “life imprisonment” as an alternative to the death penalty is a travesty.Unfortunately, we do not live in a just society. Rather, we live in a society afflicted with corruption at every level; from the dumbed-down nature of our public education systems, the politicians available to the highest bidder and the law enforcement agencies with agendas steered by ethnic interests groups such as the Anti-Defamation League or corrupted law enforcement agencies who will frame innocent people in order to protect guilty informants. We have law enforcement agencies who will spend millions of dollars tracking someone because of mere OPINIONS that they do not like; and invent novel interpretations of law to enable prosecution via a proxy offense.In fact, at the national level, we have a legal system that has developed tactics intended to secure convictions rather than justice and which layers dozens of different criminal violations on the same person for various aspects of the same alleged criminal act and brings such force to bear that they secure a conviction rate exceeding 95%. Do you really BELIEVE that 95% of people charged with federal crimes deserve punishment? I certainly don’t.Furthermore, it is an established fact that a person’s odds of avoiding serious punishment are proportional to his wealth.Even worse, with the enhanced Constitutional violations of the Patriot Act, it is now possible for someone to be sentenced to death without having an opportunity to even examine the source of the evidence used against him because it would be secured as a national secret.In other words, as many have said, in the Halls of Justice, the only Justice is in the halls. Under such a system, allowing government the ability to kill citizens who are incapacitated due to capture is insane. We can have no effective faith that the people slated for execution by the state actually deserve that punishment. It could be just as likely that the person has been framed in order to silence his dissent.Under such conditions, an organization whose very purpose is the explicit excoriation of the status quo cannot support the death penalty. To do so could be supporting the unjust murder of its members by the state. Another way to say this is that allowing the state to exact ultimate punishments while failing to restrict it through the Bill of Rights is folly. It becomes power without responsibility — the very foundation of tyranny.We are dealing with a government that serves the interests of pull-politics and everyone but its own founding people. This government has effectively declared war on the population. Only a fool enables an enemy to execute him by his own permission.So until such time as we have re-secured the liberties for which our founders shed their blood; liberties which would ensure justice in the disposition of penalties while protecting the innocent, we are opposing the enactment or implementation of the death penalty.It is true that during this time; our people will be forced to subsidize the existence of illegal alien scum that has murdered our folk; and this is also an injustice. But it would be an even greater injustice at this time to support the very infrastructure that could be used to legitimize the murder of dissenters in our quest for the renewal of Liberty.